The Apple Mac is enjoying steady, growing adoption in the enterprise. For fiscal year 2012, Apple reported 18.1 million Macs were sold, a 6.5 percent growth compared to the previous fiscal year. Despite the Mac’s growing popularity, many enterprises continue to manage Macs using haphazard, manual procedures that create real-time problems when performing patch updates and system maintenance for Macs.

“We are observing a steady growth of Mac computers across all verticals,” said Mathivanan Venkatachalam, director of product management at ManageEngine. “But it only takes a few Macs on a network to create a complicated, time-consuming management chore for IT admins to manage manually. To help enterprises manage the Mac desktops and laptops, we’re rolling out patch management support for Macs. Going forward, we will add more features for Mac management including software deployment, remote control and more.”

Mac Patch Management Highlights

The patch management support for Macs in Desktop Central helps IT staff overcome the vulnerabilities that create security weakness, corrupt critical system data or cause system unavailability. Highlights of the new Mac patch management capabilities include:

Mac OS and app support includes Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), 10.7 (Lion) and 10.8 (Mountain Lion) as well as third-party applications such as Adobe, Java and others.

On-demand patch scanning performs scans of all systems running a supported version of Mac OS X and apps and then reports on the vulnerability status of the network.

Bulk and scheduled patch deployment lets administrators execute deployments based on patch priority and on time, e.g., weekends and other off-peak hours.

Severity-based patch management allows administrators to create and configure severity levels for missing patches, which are then deployed based on severity.

Patch approval mechanism tests and approves patches in a controlled environment to ensure that they are error-free and stable, before they are rolled out to the entire network.

Desktop Central 8 support for Mac patch management is available immediately. Prices start at $545 for 50 computers annually for the Professional Edition. The Free Edition of Desktop Central manages up to 25 computers and two mobile devices. A free, fully-functional trial version is available at http://ow.ly/7R4ke.

ManageEngine delivers the real-time IT management tools that empower an IT team to meet an organization’s need for real-time services and support. Worldwide, more than 72,000 established and emerging enterprises — including more than 60 percent of the Fortune 500 — rely on ManageEngine products to ensure the optimal performance of their critical IT infrastructure, including networks, servers, applications, desktops and more. ManageEngine is a division of Zoho Corp. with offices worldwide, including the United States, India, Japan and China. For more information, please visit http://www.manageengine.com/; follow the company blog athttp://blogs.manageengine.com/, on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/ManageEngine and on Twitter at@ManageEngine.

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